Elmer Bernstein, 82, Wrote Scores for More Than 100 Films

Elmer Bernstein, the American film composer who died on Wednesday aged 82, wrote some of the most influential and memorable music in the history of cinema; among his scores were the stirring themes to “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Great Escape.”Bernstein got his break in 1956, when Victor Young, the veteran composer of such films as “Shane,” fell ill while working on the score for Cecil B. DeMille’s “Ten Commandments.” Before he died, Young recommended the virtually unknown Bernstein to DeMille as his replacement, having been impressed by his work on the half-dozen minor films that Bernstein had scored so far.DeMille took a chance on Bernstein, and was rewarded with a soundtrack that fully matched the epic qualities of his film. More important, though, for the development of film music was the other score that Bernstein wrote that year, for the film of Nelson Algren’s “The Man With the Golden Arm” (1956).Its raw, strident sound was, along with the work of Bernstein’s contemporaries Alex North and Leonard Rosenmann on, respectively, “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) and “Rebel Without A Cause” (1955), one of the first films to make use of the rhythms of jazz.Thereafter, Bernstein began to create a distinctively American sound for film music that broke with the European heritage that had dominated the “Golden Age” of Hollywood. Instead, he was influenced by two forms of music indigenous to America: jazz, and the folk symphonies pioneered by Aaron Copland.One type of film that offered a particular opportunity for Bernstein to create his American sound was the Western. Cowboy films provided him with some of his best scores, and he enjoyed a fruitful association with John Wayne in the actor’s last films, writing the music for such pictures as “The Sons of Katie Elder” (1965), “True Grit” (1969), and “The Shootist” (1976).Bernstein’s most enduring success, however, and the one that perhaps best realized his aim, was his score for “The Magnificent Seven” (1960), its cantering rhythms driven by energetic bursts of brass, bass flute, and drums. Its popularity was rivaled only by that other most eminently whistle able of themes, that of “The Great Escape”(1963).Bernstein’s score gave each character his own musical motif, which was a variation on the main refrain, the jaunty notes of which perfectly captured the Allied prisoners’ mood of defiance.He became one of Hollywood’s most successful and prolific composers, with more than 100 films to his credit; to distinguish him from the New York-based Leonard Bernstein, the pair were known in the business, from the coasts on which they worked, as Bernstein East (Leonard) and Bernstein West (Elmer).Elmer Bernstein, the only child of Ukrainian immigrants, was born in New York on April 4, 1922. He was educated at the Juilliard School and New York University, specializing in the piano and studying composition with Roger Sessions and Stefan Wolpe. In 1942 he was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Corps, with which he began to arrange and compose music for Armed Forces Radio. He worked regularly with Glenn Miller and his Army Air Corps Band.After the war, he became a concert pianist, and then, in 1950, was invited to score a radio drama. This led him to Hollywood, where he began to write for the screen. His early films included such perishable fare as “Boots Malone” (1951) and “Sudden Fear”(1952),the score that aroused Victor Young’s interest.Bernstein’s career was nearly derailed in the 1950s by the congressional inquiry into un-American activities. Asked to identify communists in the film industry, he refused. Although he was not blacklisted, for a time the major studios refused to hire him, and he was reduced to composing for low budget films with titles such as “Robot Monster” and “Cat Women of the Moon.” Ironically, it was the anti-communist DeMille who then gave Bernstein his opportunity.Among Bernstein’s notable scoreswere those for “Summer and Smoke” (1962); the infectiously jazzy music for “Walk On the Wild Side” (1962), and “Hawaii” (1966). He also wrote the nostalgic, waltzlike theme of “To Kill A Mockingbird”(1964).For each of these, he was nominated for an Oscar. In all, he was nominated on 14 occasions, both for original scores and for individual songs for films – but he won only once, for “Thoroughly Modern Millie” (1967),which most critics agree was not among his strongest.His final nomination was in 2003, for the caustic “Far From Heaven.”Bernstein’s music was known both for its vibrancy and for its melodiousness; but he could turn his hand to anything, including, in later years, such unlikely choices for a composer of his seniority as the comedies “National Lampoon’s Animal House” (1979), “Airplane (1980), “Trading Places” (1983), and “Ghostbusters” (1984).His theme to “The Man With the Golden Arm” was later revived as the title music to Dennis Potter’s British television fantasy “Lipstick On Your Collar” (1992).In the 1990s Bernstein was Martin Scorsese’s composer of choice, writing the music for the director’s reworking of “Cape Fear” (1995) – for which Bernstein largely followed Bernard Herrmann’s original score – and for “The Age of Innocence” (1993).For the latter, Bernstein supplied a score that drew on the music of the period and hinted at the repressed emotions of the characters, the soundtrack formal and decorous on the surface but suggesting darker passions beneath.Mr. Scorsese once said: “It’s one thing to write music that reinforces a film…. It’s entirely another to write music that graces a film. That’s what Elmer Bernstein does, and that, for me, is his greatest gift.”However, Mr. Scorsese eventually rejected the complete score Bernstein had written for “Gangs of New York.”Bernstein was also a conductor, and composed several orchestral suites, a number of pieces of chamber music, and a musical, “How Now, Dow Jones” (1967). He was president of the Composers’ and Lyricists’ Guild of America from 1970 until 1982. In 1964 he won an Emmy Award for “The Making of the President” (1960).

Elmer Bernstein, 82, Wrote Scores for More Than 100 Films

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